Wireless Broadband networks, such those defined by EDGE, GPRS, EVDO, EVDV, UMTS and others, have given little attention to requirements posed by applications whose functions are based on actions initiated autonomously by the device, application or service, in contrast to functions initiated by the. Such applications include, for example, email, instant messaging, visual voicemail and voice and video telephony, and others. Such applications typically require an always-on IP connection and frequent transmit of small bits of data. Wireless Broadband networks are designed and optimized for high-throughput of large amounts of data, not for applications that require frequent, but low-throughput and/or small amounts of data.
Each transaction puts the mobile device radio in a high power mode for considerable length of time—typically between 15-30 seconds. As the high power mode can consume as much as 100× the power as an idle mode, these autonomously initiated applications quickly drain battery in Wireless Broadband networks. The issue has been further exacerbated by the rapid increase of popularity of applications with autonomously-initiated functionalities, such as mobile gaming, social media, news feeds, streaming video and audio, and others which may require an always-on of frequent IP connections and frequent transmit of small bits of data.
As such, applications (e.g., mobile applications) have changed the needs of caching, transport and content management. Traditional caching strategies are no longer suitable as when wireless standards were specified, there was little attention to requirements posed by applications whose functions are based on actions initiated by the network, compared to functions initiated by the user or by the device.